What does it mean to “Defer feature updates” in Windows 10?

Most of us are pretty excited whenever a new feature lands itself onto Windows 10 for us to start experimenting with. Windows 10 is an operating system that touts itself as being all about constant evolution, so those of us who are passionate about those concepts are more often than not willing to dive head-first into what new frontiers Microsoft is sending us down. There is, however, a pretty sizeable group of people who want nothing to do with new features, and would rather stick with a stable, consistent operating system that doesn’t have any of those extra bells or whistles.

There is, however, a pretty sizeable group of people who want nothing to do with new features, and would rather stick with a stable, consistent operating system that doesn’t have any of those extra bells or whistles over the occasionally unstable feature release.

For those people, Microsoft included a helpful option in Windows 10. If you go to your Windows settings, select “Update and Security,” and go to the advanced options, you’ll see that you can defer any number of updates from Windows 10 – at least for a while. If you don’t see the option there, it means that your edition of Windows 10 doesn’t support the feature. As it stands, most people running Windows 10 Home (as opposed to Windows 10 Pro) don’t get the option to defer updates.

When you defer upgrades, new Windows features won’t be downloaded or installed for several months. Deferring upgrades doesn’t affect security updates. Note that deferring upgrades will prevent you from getting the latest Windows features as soon as they’re available.

Note that, if you’re looking for a way to delay security updates, you’re simply out of luck. Other than that, however, this is the best course of action if you’re trying to keep Windows 10 nice and consistent. Checking off the option is going to keep away any new features for quite some time, so by the time they arrive you can be sure they’ll be polished and relatively bug-free.